Progress

By Haines Brown, from a dialog on the PhiloOfHi list, February
2003

I guess we've beat this topic into the ground, but there's one
issue to which I said I would return, and so please bear with me. This
contribution is also intended to convey to Jim that I'm really
quite sympathetic to his aims, despite some qualms and confusions
along the way.

I had suggested that our conclusions regarding progress in history had
a lot to do with people's reasons for raising the question in the
first place. I will try to illustrate this and will conclude that the
approach we ought to take today is not far from what Jim proposes.

Rather than expecting the roasted pigeons of pure science to fly into
our open mouths, we should perhaps start by bringing in an element of
significance or meaning that results from the question of the social
function of a conception of historical progress.

So I'd like to offer a little hypothesis regarding the stages of
the development of the notion of historical progress. Being merely a
hypothesis, I will not try to elaborate or defend it, for the
hypothesis only provides a little context for a concluding suggestion
that today we need a new conception of progress that is better suited
to the contemporary world.

To keep things simple, and because of my ignorance, I will confine my
remarks to the Western tradition.

Intuitively, we would expect there to have been stages in the
development of the idea of progress appropriate to the stages of
historical development.

For example, we might name the first stage in the history of this
idea, the “consolation of philosophy.” In classical
antiquity, people had limited sense of any power over circumstances,
and this made a notion of linear progress very unlikely. Rather, most
citizens (for whom alone the issue of time had significance) assumed
that history was circular and governed by “fortuna.”

This contradictory combination of predestination and accident could be
readily applied to any situation, of course, for the aim was not to
control history by getting it right, but to reconcile oneself to the
world. If you had the misfortune of being born in difficult times, the
best you could do was to hope that the cycle will soon return an age
of gold. Until then, you had to acquire a strength of
character—the “virtu” needed to to endure a age of
iron.

Much has been written about the emergence of a notion of a linear
spiritual progress in the Judao-Christian tradition. The Incarnation
opened the possibility for a struggle against fortuna in spiritual
terms (the notion of evil was a later invention), and for many there
was an expectation of a Second Coming that would bring history to a
close and offer everlasting life to the saints. That much of this was
anticipated by Zoroastrianism need not detain me here, for the point
is that there was a limited sense of linear progress, or at least
progressive stages in history, defined in terms of spiritual
development, in lieu of any real control over fate.

The Second stage in the development of a notion of historical progress
was in fact named “renovatio (respublica cristiana).” A
study of the culture associated with the Carolingian Renaissance and
the feudal society that followed reveals a remarkable confidence in
man's ability to transform, not just his own essential nature, but
his material environment as well. Again, much has been written about
this, such as the centrality of labor as the model of human struggle
(Benedictine Rule), on how a spiritual transformation is connected
with a material one in which society is a bride bathed and made worthy
of Christ's Second Coming as her groom, etc.

However, this optimistic view of human capability was subsumed under
an ideal order that constrained it, not just ideologically (anti-usury
laws, for example), but also through a structure of power based on
religion and legal tradition that ensured aristocratic
domination. There were sharp limits to the extent to which you could
or should pursue worldly progress as an end in itself.

These constraints were shattered by the bourgeois revolution, for it
was argued (Adam Smith) that a pursuit of private gain was no longer
the principle vice, but was morally justified because it resulted in
the wealth of nations—in a general economic progress that
benefitted, to varying degrees, everyone.

What the bourgeois revolution offered was a substantial and unfettered
material progress, which justified a violation of the aristocratic
ruling class, the Church and traditional norms. For this reason, it
was important to offer a conception of progress that was naturalistic,
that depended on everyone's pursuit of private gain, but gave rise
to an emergent wealth that was greater than the sum of individual
contributions. Without such emergent wealth, the rich would just get
richer and the poor, necessarily poorer.

I'll name this notion of progress, “ideological
self-justification.” Bourgeois progress found justification in
an actual rise of general prosperity, and it supported a three-stage
conception of world history: savagery, barbarism, and finally
civilization. It was civilization that created a civil order in which
individual gain would give rise to an emergent wealth which could to
some extent benefit everyone (or at least, possessors of means of
production, which originally was almost everyone).

Since this ideology nicely described the actual world that Europeans
had encountered since the 15th century and also coincided with an
observable increase in the economic product (as in 18th century
England, well before the so-called Industrial Revolution), it
justified behaviors such as greed and regicide that had hitherto been
damned.

Because this notion of progress was ideological, it was impervious to
the actual economic ups and downs of the 19th century, and in fact
gained a new lease on life at the time of the Second Industrial
Revolution, where, for the bourgeoisie, technology replaced labor as
the source of economic growth. So the owner of capital (materialized
technology) could rightfully lay claim to the profits and push aside
the increasing demands of the emergent industrial working class, which
had appropriated for itself (and transformed) Adam Smith's labor
theory of value.

In terms of European intellectual history, the final collapse of an
optimistic notion of linear progress may be associated with the First
World War. Although technology remained the source of new wealth, so
that the owners of the means of production might justifiably
appropriate the surplus value it created, there arose a darker vision
of progress that either doubted its existence entirely or attributed
it simply to the Realpolitik of empire (redistribution).

However, just as the bourgeois notion of progress stumbled toward its
demise, there arose an alternative that might be named the
“class-struggle” notion of progress. This shared with the
bourgeois definition a focus on material progress, but argued that the
contradictions of capitalism that had given rise to so much war and
economic uncertainty could be overcome so that the relation between
wealth and its social base would be restored.

What might easily be missed, however, is that this new vision entailed
a basically different way of seeing things. Progress in this view was
not a linear historical change in terms of some external standard,
whether that standard be empirically objective (linear development) or
subjective (improvement), but a measure of the degree to which social
power sufficed to impose on circumstances the needs of the social man.

Working-class solidarity is the only embodying mankind's social
nature, but also is in a position to transform the present world in
conformity with that social nature. The aim was not a utopian vision
of some future society, but an assertion of human needs and
capacities, as they exist in a particular time and place and
transforms circumstances in those terms. Progress, in short, refers
to the process of the social transformation of circumstance; it is the
establishment of a causal relation, not a pattern of empirical change.

In this conception, progress is not really linear in the sense that it
is guided by an external goal, but focused on the injection into a
situation of actually existing human capacities, which in effect
humanizes that situation, freeing it, for example, of the anti-social
conditions required for capital's self-expansion. If our social
capacities suffice to transform the present, that would represents
progress in terms of our social existence, however fluid or diverse
the particulars might be.

While empirically one might also well argue that social power has on
the whole increased throughout history, this does not automatically
bring any commensurate benefit. It only represents a potential, for
society as a whole needs to harness that power to social needs, rather
than have economic development remain the servant of the conditions
that had originally made it possible and are no longer required.

It should be evident that one presupposition of this view of progress
is an inner mechanism of change intrinsic to all things, rather than
an external driver. Now days we often associate that external driver
of progress with the vision of those people who happen to enjoy the
power necessary to determine outcomes, but ,of course, to the extent
that is compatible with the conditions of their power.

The new view of progress requires it to be intrinsic in every
situation, rather than the result of the imposition of a greater power
from the outside. We need only to know how to seize upon natural
potentials, for development is always an intrinsic possibility in the
natural world in which we live. That's what I believe Jim was
getting at.